Nov 15, 2012

European Peg Solitaire Solvability

The European version of the popular game "Brainvita" (or "Peg Solitaire") looks as follows:

Y Y O O O Y Y

Y O O O O O Y

O O O O O O O

O O O T O O O
O O O O O O O

Y O O O O O Y

Y Y O O O Y Y

Prove that the initial configuration as shown in the representation is not solvable.

Background:
The game fills the entire board with pegs except for the central hole. The objective is, making valid moves, to empty the entire board except for a solitary peg. A valid move is to jump a peg orthogonally over an adjacent peg into a hole two positions away and then to remove the jumped peg.

4 comments:

Let A, B and C be the number of pebbles on colours 'a', 'b' and 'c' respectively. The relative parity of A, B and C remains conserved after every move. And initially, A = B = C = 12. Hence it is unsolvable.

PS : By relative parity, I mean [A (xor) B] and [B (xor) C] are conserved.Basically, if initially, A:odd B:odd C:even, then after any number of moves, it'll either be A:odd B:odd C:even or A:even B:even C:odd

Just colour it like a chess board. Then we will have 16 pegs in black and 20 pegs in white (or vice versa). A valid move always gets a peg into the same colour and a peg is removed from the same colour. So, definitely one peg from each of the colour will remain no matter what.

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I am an early stage technology investor at Nexus Venture Partners. Prior to this, I was a 3x product entrepreneur. Prior to this, I worked as a private equity analyst at Blackstone and as a quant analyst at Morgan Stanley. I graduated from Department of Computer Science and Engineering of IIT Bombay. I enjoy Economics, Dramatics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Business.

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